When planning a piece of social media we need to ask ourselves if it is going to be;

Knowledgeable

Does this activity demonstrate knowledge on the part of the brand? Is it something that you know about our product category that your competitors don’t? Is it knowledge that is unique to your brand, product or service? From the audience’s point of view you need to consider if its something they need or want to know. Are you increasing their knowledge or just telling them something they already know or could have gained elsewhere?

Useful

Not all of social media activity is useful to the brand’s audience. Not all dissemination of knowledge is actually useful to the brand. It might be commercially sensitive. It might promote an out of stock product or a discontinued service. The best-case scenario is when an activity is useful to both the brand and the audience such as with Amazon’s product ratings; the audience benefits by having unbiased reviews to help them make their decisions. Amazon benefits from the free content and additional product information for its audience. I’d add here that providing entertainment is actually useful. Ask any bored office worker, student or house bound parent – a good laugh has plenty of use.

Desirable

Thinking through the desirability of an activity can be a great check against what is assumed to be useful. By desirable we mean that both the brand and the audience actively want it. This is a step on from useful. Think of eating your greens; useful but not that desirable. Conversely, consider for a moment the joys of unlimited self saucing sticky date pudding – desirable – oh yes, but no, not actually that useful. If something is desirable, really tasty-can’t-get-enough-of-it desirable to your audience you’ll know it. The servers will fall over. Your hosting bill will go through the roof and you’ll get calls from the IT department over the weekend screaming about terabytes of data. Desirable is a can be a challenge because making something truly desirable is actually quite tricky.

Open

Used to the impression of control that broadcast media had previously afforded them, open is a concept that some brands have been struggling with. Open means honest and transparent. Not just about the parts of the message that are desirable to the brand, but about the whole lot, warts and all. An audience will respond very actively and negatively when they believe a brand has been dishonest with them. There are lost of examples of where brands have been dishonest and been caught. Don’t be one of them. It doesn’t even require active dishonesty – just a lack of intent to be completely open can come across badly.

Sharable

Another degree further of open is making the activity sharable. Are the materials easily downloadable? Can it be linked to or have you gone and wrapped them up in a big Flash movie that no one can link to? If it’s a Flash movie then there’s less material that can be shared in social book-marking sites like del.icio.us, Digg and Stumbleupon. It is as important as being open that the brand then follow that up by making the activity sharable by acknowledging standard protocols that enable sharing and by actively promoting sharing with a simple “Digg this” button or a downloadable Zip file of assets.

Measuring

This process of thinking through the KUDOS attributes will help a brand decide on what channel they are going to use and how they are going to use it. That decision making process can also result in deciding what the brand is going to measure to determine if those attributes have been met.

Perhaps as a result of this, we’re increasingly seeing social media releases used instead of traditional press releases.  This isn’t necessarily all to the good, and we thought it might therefore be helpful to look beyond some of the hype and offer a little guidance as to when, where and how these two very different communications tools should be used.

To some extent, our mantra of doing new things in a traditional way applies to the release of news into the social media space. To increase its popularity, a social media release should be concise, compelling, and composed with creativity and an eye for perfection before it’s furnished with social media tools.

Yet press releases and social media releases have different objectives and audiences, and therefore need to be approached in slightly different ways.

How the SMR evolved out of the press release is easy to understand.  Press releases have been widely shared and posted online, and their digital marketing value is self-evident.  The logical next step has been to make them more palatable for online audiences - hence the social media release.

This accidental benefit of the press release has had an unfortunate side-effect, however.  In trying to convert it into a social media tool, many communicators have forgotten the particular needs of the audience for which these announcements were originally intended - the press.

Because they serve different communications purposes, SMRs and traditional press releases should be viewed as complementary tools.  Resist the temptation to abandon press releases in favour of their cooler, hipper offspring.  If used properly, both will serve you well.

The key objective of an SMR is that it should be valued and shared by what might be called “end audiences” - usually consumers, but potentially partners, employees, regulators, investors, peers, the local community and other stakeholders.  There is no intermediary involved.  It’s just you and your target audience.

As we preach constantly, a social media release should meet the same criteria as any piece of social media content: i.e., it should have KUDOS. The K, U and D are nothing new to PR writing pros: tell your audience something interesting and useful, empower them with knowledge, and write something desirable. Embracing the O and the S can help you to engage audiences and propagate your news throughout the universe of online dialogue by communicating in an open, conversational manner and offering commenting functionality on the release. Also, by adding Delicious buttons and suchlike, the content becomes shareable.

Press releases, by contrast, are for journalists - intermediary filters who stand between you and your target audiences, and who require above all else simple, trustworthy information that they can use to construct a story. 

These differences are important.  Many of the characteristics that give a social media release KUDOS mark a press release out for instant rejection by a reporter.

Journalists look for news first, while other audiences may be seeking something else entirely: a quick laugh, an interesting but scarcely known fact or, most likely, “What’s in it for me?”

You can talk directly to your audience in an SMR, but you should never write ”you” in a press release.  You can be relaxed, informal and entertaining in an SMR.  A journalist, however, wants facts and key arguments as early and succinctly as possible; anything that delays the revelation of useful information represents time wasted. 

Of course, the power and clarity of a news release can and will often be the heart and soul of your social media release.  But before you use either, consider who you want to talk to and what you want to say.  Chances are you’ll want to use both. 

We’ll be providing further information about the practicalities of creating a social media release in the near future, so stay tuned.

Danish PM, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is, apparently, the European Champion of Facebook, whatever that means. He certainly has a few supporters on his Facebook Page - 14,330 as I type this post. He gets on Facebook, he engages in dialogue with his fans, in person; and they love him for it. So what does a modern politician do with that kind of support? Take a hundred of them out for a jog in public, of course.

That is PR platinum right there - spot on. And you know what, he probably even enjoyed it too.

Is it just me or is there a lot of talk these days about Quick Response codes? QR codes have been a huge success in Japan, not so elsewhere but that may be about to change. As handset technology improves we may see an increase in the use of inbuilt barcode scanners and their reappearance could be a boon for marketers looking for new ways to drive traffic to sites.

Google, stumbled first time around with the barcode scanning device CueCat which was given away with participating newspapers and magazines allowing readers to scan codes in the publications. Google have renewed their interest in the technology and are teaming up with the home shopping network QVC to take another crack at it.

QR code developers look to Japan for what’s possible, since almost every one of the 100 million mobile phone users have a handset with the technology built in. This means no need for any software downloads, or separate devices, as has been the case in other markets. Almost everyone knows what they are and how to use them especially the youth market meaning that the codes have become an integral part of ad campaigns.

One problem with the codes though is that they are fairly dull things to look at and advertisers haven’t made much of an effort to differentiate their codes from each other. Enter Carl van Wijk and the team at QR-It a small startup in Tokyo. Carl’s creative background was at odds with the bland black and white dots and so he decided to experiment with them. The results speak for themselves. Carl has cleverly blended the QR code with the ad, making it part of the story. One code made for an album release featured the hundreds of the band members heads instead of black and white dots. Another used basketballs to make up the code, while a series for a creative agency in Tokyo featured a menagerie of animals each with a code camouflaged on their body. This summer they will be working with companies to use codes at music festivals and outdoor settings using projections of codes onto buildings and a QR code that will be made up of people and shot from the roof of a nearby building.

I am not usually one for predictions but if I were, I’d say we are seeing the start of a QR revolution that will have a myriad of applications, particularly in the social mediascape. (and yes, the white heads in front of Darth Vader are stormtroopers!)

The internet was founded by geeks who wanted to share ideas and data with each other. Though nobody foresaw the size of the internet’s success, the conception of what is now the largest resource in history was an act of social behaviour. The internet was never branded, there was no business plan, and I don’t believe that such a mighty phenomenon would have evolved from any less selfless behaviour than it did. However, we’re not all computer scientists and many of us would not have had access to the web without the creation of easy-to-use tools such as browsers and search engines.

While packaged, usable technologies can open the door for the masses to engage with the internet, it is easy become ignorant of the greater possibilities presented by more customisable, fuzzier systems like open source developer platforms. Last week, Oxford and Harvard professor, Jonathan Zittrain was quoted in the BBC warning us to avoid this ignorance and fight to maintain what he calls generative technologies. Just at look at what Lego did when their Mindstorms product was hacked by techies and redeveloped to perform new, unplanned functions: Lego didn’t sue the hackers, they employed them.

I see this dichotomy as existing within social media activities too. We are great advocates of openness here, in fact it’s the “O” in our KUDOS acronym. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for slick, accessible tools, if they provide the time- and expertise-poor masses with new services. It all depends on who your audiences are and whether they are likely to adapt and collaborate on your tools or just want a quick fix.

Persistent profiles

Our online profile is a representation of ourselves online. Profiles can vary from a  username in a forum to an avatar in Second Life. Increasingly it can be a social network profile. Who we are, how we present the aspects of ourselves and how we maintain control over that is an increasingly key issue in social media. One way that we think this is going to develop is in the consolidation of profiles and possibly the creation of consistent or persistent profiles. Google’s OpenSocial presages such a development. It is comprised of three elements; Profile Information (me), Friends Information (my friends) and Activities (things that happen). The principle of OpenSocial means that as a user moves an application or widget between different social networking platforms their profile is maintained and the same as they move their profile between widgets or social networks. So my contacts on VBMA, my industry network don’t have to be all uploaded again to my Bebo profile. The application I add to my Linkedin profile will also work on my Plaxo network. 

What might we choose to keep in this profile? Credit rating, sexual preference, search history, privacy settings, music taste. And where might it follow us? Not just across social networking sites, but across all sites that provide some level of interaction based on who we are and what we want. Our profiles will have elements that are maintained as we do our banking, add friends to  MySpace and as we slay a few enemies in World of Warcraft. We will be able to manage our profiles as we see fit – presenting different identities to the online world depending on the context. Friends will see a different profile to business associates. However for this to work  properly, there will need to be some significant improvements in how our data is collected, stored and used. In the same way that the web is teaching us to doubt the veracity of all information, so it will also erode our naivety about all degrees of privacy unless those we trust with our privacy prove to be worthy of it.

Aggregated intelligence

The online environment has made it easier for large groups of widely dispersed individuals to express ideas, vote for an outcome or to give something a rating. It also makes it easier for these expressions to be aggregated. This aggregated intelligence has been termed the ‘wisdom of crowds’ or ‘collective intelligence’ and the process of harnessing it; ‘crowdsourcing’ is on the rise. The web audience is already familiar with sites that harness the collective intelligence. Old favourites Wikipedia, Flickr and del.icio.us are being joined by new ones such as the Encyclopedia of Life. If collective knowledge is what we are seeing now – the harbingers of the next stage; collective action are already starting to emerge.

In the UK myfootballclub allows supporters to buy a share in the club and then vote on transfers, player selection and all major decisions affecting the club. Collective football club management is also being experimented with in Israel on Web2sport.com where fans log in and watch the game live via a video feed. Fans use a chat facility to comment on the game and suggest tactical alterations, which are then voted on. Sitting in the dugout, with a laptop computer and wireless internet access, the coach enacts the changes. “This is the wisdom of the crowd, not one man. It’s democracy,” Hogeg said. “This idea has no limits.”

Wherever people group around an interest, there is aggregated intelligence; MySpace started life as (and is still very popular as) a platform for bands to promote themselves. We’re now seeing the emergence of ancillary services such as German based Sellaband, which collects small amounts from large groups to finance the production of professional recordings for independent bands, and so doing away with the need for financing from labels. 

Its not hard to see how this principle of collective participation and financing could be extended to dance companies and novelists resulting in the 2009 launch of The Royal MySpace Ballet and the tear-away success of a self publishing platform as writers dessert their publishers and go direct to their public; www.bidforabook.com/martin_amis

These examples demonstrate that the principles of crowdsourcing work, albeit in quite different ways; some tapping collective intelligence, some simply taping collective bank balances. While this idea is not new, the Westminster electoral system and the stock market share these principles of collective participation, they are more easily accessed and more widely distributed when put online. And this is going to continue to increase. How will crowdsourcing move into other online activities? As I am writing this article Snagsta is launching; a service that promises to take your like minded friends into account when retuning search results; it’s social search.

Open acronyms

Open is always better than closed in social media. In the Contagious report we’ve looked at how truly social applications like Last.fm and Google Maps are opening up their APIs for use by partners and audience members. This opening up is also happening with IP through the Creative Commons copyright tools. Last year Ryan*MacMillan worked with Sony Europe to release all of the assets for the Blu-ray campaign under Creative Commons licenses. The growing demand of social media audiences for content and their disregard for traditional copyright restrictions will lead content owners to look at ways of letting their audiences participate with their content and data more freely and creatively. The smart ones, like Last.fm, will work out how to do it so that it enhances rather than cannibalises their businesses.

As forward-looking companies release their data we are going to see more ways that users can take it and make it useful. Already Yahoo! Pipes enables users to take the APIs from different businesses and create completely new data sets and services. The number of ways that this can be done is only going to increase as these new versions of data find audiences and these new audiences discover new needs and express new demands.

The audience matters (even more)

The feedback cycles enabled by social media mean that consumers are no longer just wanting to have their complaints heard by a complaints department they are expecting a resulting change in the product or service. This will mean a blurring of marketing and product development, as the cycles of each become intertwined and eventually twinned.

Smart brands won’t wait for consumers to come to them with product ideas, they will go out and find the sharpest audience members and actively engage them. The well known examples include Lego letting its customers design products, posting them on the site and then order the bricks required to construct them. Some of these creations are then picked up and become a part of Lego’s actual wider product offering.Companies like Innocentive are creating a collection point for brands to find experts they can tap for collective knowledge. The recently launched Kluster gathers a community of people as well as a process for developing the ideas. As the demand for expert opinion and skills increases verticals will appear. Already Techdirt provides a service for IT and technology companies wanting input into trends and product ideas.

Increasingly the marketing or product enhancements released by brands are going to be pieces of software or utility. The sense that the audience can try an application for a day or a week and then drop it has created an environment of constant development. For innovative brands wanting to get into social media it means that its easy to test the water. For traditional brands used to controlling the distribution and impact of their efforts this is going to be very frustrating as it requires a new way of approaching communications; KUDOS might well give them a good steer as to where to begin. 

Thinking of the audience as users

The people online are users. This is a word that has been criticised in some circles because it de-humanises the audience, but it’s salutary to remember what it means in the traditional computing sense: having a functional requirement. In other words they are trying to Get Something Done. If a brand can help them get something done then they’ll be happy. If it can’t they will step around it and if it impedes them they’ll get angry. As users they are not sitting in between Coronation Street and Strictly Come Dancing waiting for a gorilla to play the drums and make them smile - they are actively engaged in Getting Something Done. Now that something might well be wasting half an hour looking at clips on YouTube - which could well include a clip a mate has linked them to of a gorilla playing the drums. But brands need to remember - this content can’t just be put in front of an audience - the users will select it if it is useful to their functional requirement. Which might include laughing their arses off.

In recent years several companies have emerged to provide insights into the levels of online conversational activity around their clients. These companies use a widely varying mix of complex measurement technologies and processing methods to offer different approaches to conversation monitoring.

We surveyed 10 of the most prominent monitoring companies in the UK and US to compare the services on offer. The survey looks at each company’s background and successes, what it measures and where, how the resulting data is analysed and reported, and how much each service costs.

The full collection of responses from the agencies was too big to be published in the report so I’m taking this opportunity to give you access to it here. Click on the file name to be taken to a full-screen, downloadable version.

I’ve outlined below some interesting patterns and trends which we’ve drawn from the agencies’ responses. What is clear from the various processes, solutions and explanations is that this is a rapidly maturing method of research, and that the only sure-fire way of finding which supplier is right for you is to trial one or more of the services.

History and success
Our survey set includes a mixture of companies, some of which started before the dotcom boom period, and others that have sprung up since 2004. All of the companies have strong client lists, suggesting no run-away industry leader, although Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ response noted that it was named as the market share leader in the Outsell Social Media Market Intelligence Report, December 2007.

Methodology - measurement
All of the companies approach conversation measurement in slightly different ways and with differing levels of complexity. Some focus on explaining what they measure, others on how. One, Umbria, offers an additional feature that helps uncover trends in the genders and ages of those speaking by using NLP algorithms. As far as measuring influence in conversation is concerned, this again is done in different ways, but normally taking into account multiple factors. Measuring influence is a core part of the service offered by Onalytica, Magpie, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, VML SEER and 1000heads.

Methodology - analysis and reporting
All but three of the companies use fully automated processes to analyse data; Nielsen, MotiveQuest and 1000heads all draw particular attention to the additional level of human analysis as a core part of their product. 1000heads is the only company surveyed that performs more manual work than automated.

For data cleansing, all companies use at least part-automated processes but do so in very different ways. MotiveQuest, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Dow Jones & Company, Umbria and 1000heads mentioned the use of additional manual filtering.

Where presentation of data is concerned, there is an even split between the use of offline methods, such as PowerPoint, and online methods, such as dashboards.

Coverage
Most companies monitor a varying but sizeable part of the blogosphere, as well as other selected social media environments (eg message boards and social networks). A number of companies (BuzzLogic, Magpie, Dow Jones & Company, MotiveQuest and Cymfony) draw attention to the fact that they monitor some degree of mainstream media. Onalytica and SEER go one step further and seemingly spread their nets over almost the entire web. Onalytica states that it monitors ‘everything freely and publicly available online’ while SEER states that it ‘aggregates activity from any online location that doesn’t require a password’.

Pricing
Costs are expressed in a number of formats, but the answers of those companies who offered a price for a single research dip range from £2,500 to £15,000 ($5,000-30,000) - with what you receive for your money varying by supplier. Only two suppliers work primarily on a subscription basis - BuzzLogic offering a yearly subscription, and Magpie monthly.

Brands know what they want to achieve and what success looks like from their point of view. But are they as clear when it comes to know what they want to get out if their social media activity.

We think that there are some ways of simplifying and ordering the issues of social media. We have tried to do this by creating a clear framework for understanding what the social media audience needs are. This framework is written with the marketer in mind, not the online adept. In doing this we modestly hope that it will provide those of you who are practitioners with some useful reference points. In reality this doesn’t ask marketers to take much of a leap – we’re simply suggesting that brands readjust their thinking to use what is already best practice in their use of other channels. That readjustment is that rather than trying to understand what social media can do for brands; you refocus on understanding the needs of the audience.

A big broad sprawling audience

Social media is exactly that, social. It’s promiscuous and indiscriminate. It gets picked up by whomever is interested and only for that reason. This is a giant step away from the targeted world of broadcast media, and this needs to be reflected in the way we think of audiences. No longer ABC1’s, we need to think of the audience as a broader constituency. This audience is defined by their role, not by the Sunday supplement they read. Any one member of it can be a customer, a product reviewer, a reseller, a journalist, a shareholder, a legislator and a potential customer. An individual can be all of these at different times or at the same time. 

A useful way of segmenting the audience

Faced with such an unruly audience we need some way of segmenting them. One of the commonly used delineations of this audience is by their behaviour. This is frequently segmented 1:9:90; dividing audiences into creators, commentators and consumers. Understanding these roles is important because they effect the way that social media spreads. Recent research (April 2007) by Charlene Li at Forrester  throws a bit more of a sharply focused light on this murky area of segmentation. Her work identifies six different levels of participation of which are mutually exclusive. Li’s segments cover; Creators 13%, Critics 19%, Collectors 15%, Joiners 19%, Spectators 33% and Inactives 52%. What I like about it is that it acknowledges the multiple roles that each audience member can occupy.

But for the sake of simplicity and consensus we’ll employ the more widely used segmentation of creator, contributor, and consumer but with the exception that we’re not ascribing any specific percentages to these behaviours. In this way we are acknowledging that multiple behaviours are possible, if not in fact very likely, in a single person.

Audience needs: the three headed Cerberus

As an initial step towards clarity we have started by taking the multi headed Hydra of audience needs and reduced it to a slightly more reasonable three headed Cerberus with three snapping needs for dialogue, content and functionality.

1. Dialogue

When a customer wants a dialogue with the brand its so they can understand better, exert some influence or so that they can be better understood. This dialogue can occur on the brand’s blog. It might just as likely occur on third party sites such as forums and specialist bloggers sites. And in some instances it will be on the consumers’ own blogs and social network sites. The subject of the conversation or dialogue might be a customer complaint. But it could also be a contribution to the NPD process; “Can you make it in green?” or “Can you increase your delivery area to include the Outer Hebrides?”. It is certainly possible that the dialogue might be around something that has been initiated by the brand such as the launch of a new product. However to be a dialogue it needs to have two sides. A successful dialogue will be a discussion around something that some segment of the audience is actively interested in. That interest needs to be strong enough that they want to have some back and forth exchange of information about it. Dialogue isn’t necessarily limited to text. An exchange of views can be conducted using video posts in the way that Jet Blue did to initiate and then continue a dialogue with Jet Blue’s customers. JetBlue, a budget airline in the US had a disastrous Valentine’s weekend that saw hundred’s of their passengers stranded in planes and  terminals. In response to the understandably furious customer backlash CEO Dave Neeleman got in front of a camera and recoded a message to Jet Blue’s customers. Neeleman used YouTube to make the video available and the audience responded by posting comments to the video. Neelemen continued the dialogue with another video posting. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_PIg7EAUw). Regardless of the medium used to conduct the conversation, it has to have a back channel. We’ve all been in conversations when we weren’t allowed or able to answer back and we know how frustrating that is. Tried calling a customer ‘service’ line where you don’t actually reach a human? Then you know what I mean. That same frustration is true of online feedback.

2. Content

Broadly speaking a second audience need is for content, or in its drier form information. This might be prompted by a need to improve their understanding or experience of the company, its products and services. It might be a need to know more about its brand attributes; what it stands for. The resulting content can be quite staid information such as detailed product guides, industry white papers or how-to guides. It can be something that enhances the brand experience such as the recent examples of Sony’s BRAVIA brand videos that worked both as online content and in paid media as advertisements. 

3. Functionality

The final snapping head is the audience’s need for functionality; the need to actually do something. They may need to enhance a product, gain access to some output of a service or to cooperate with other members of the brand’s audience. Typically this functionality has been delivered through a web site but increasingly this kind of utility is being delivered through widgets; small tools that can be downloaded to the desktop or embedded in a users site. At its most extreme it can be access to a brand’s data feed or an API (an interface for letting a software program communicate with another program; Google Maps being a widespread example. This access enables the audience to present that information in a new and useful way or even to create something completely new based on that data. 

One of the features we have found of functionality is that it looks a lot like a product or a service. We think the main distinction is that if it is functionality that has been created for marketing purposes then it is provided to its target audience for free.

In subsequent posts I’ll be looking at what kinds of online behavior characterises each of the audience segments when they are fulfilling a need around either content, dialogue or functionality and what kinds of metrics can be attributed to that behavior.

As of last Wednesday Britannica Webshare released ‘Britannica Widgets’. Lord knows the Web 2.0 savvy love nothing more than a good widget and boy have Britannica Webshare provided us with some cool widgets. The widgets are in essence blurbs of topics to be found on their online - paid for - encyclopedia. However click on the widget and it links you through to the relevant encyclopedia entry FREE OF CHARGE. But thats not all, oh no, the widget isn’t just a static link to a bigger article: it generates a cluster around a topic. So for example you have a widget about ‘Plato’ but it generates a cluster around it encompassing the entire topic of ‘Philosophy’ enabling you to access a myriad of other philosophical topics from the one initial Plato widget. More on this after the jump…

If you go here you can see all the topic clusters and they promise they are adding more everyday. Its easy and free to copy the code for the widgets (see below) so you can post the info widget in to a relevant blog post or website as well as providing the blog post/website with the cluster of information around the topic. This enables any and all readers to link through to the full article. An article I must stress that hasn’t been written by Joe Public but an expert.

Oh and if that isn’t all Encyclopedia Britannica are allowing prolific Web publishers, bloggers, webmasters, or writers free access to their entire online resources. To apply one fills in an online form and Britannica then decide whether you are influential enough to warrant free access. Seems like a great way to utilise the most prolific and imortant online avenues to re-assert the Encyclopedia Britannica brand as a digital force to be reckoned with.

It will be interesting to see how successful all of these ploys are in wrestling the crown back off Wikipedia as the number one digital encyclopedia but it certainly looks as if Encyclopedia Britannica are going about it in the right way. Certainly in terms of KUDOS these widgets are vastly Knowledgeable since they provide us with a cluster of Useful information; they’re Desirable in so far as they look pretty cool and provide you free access to a massively respected online resource; they’re not really that Open since they’re all made by Britannica but they are eminently Shareable as they allow you to ‘grab’ the html code to post anywhere on the net.

Hurrah for Encyclopedia Britannica!

Mina-san Konbanwa. Sorry for the delay in getting up and running. Two months in Australia sapped the Japanese work ethic out of me and it has taken a while to get back up to speed. Hope to have more to do with all of you very soon. Wanted to tell you about UltraSuperNew ,an interactive design agency based here in Tokyo. They have a bilingual product called “Press Army” , currently in its Alpha phase, which uses APIs from media aggregators (Youtube, Technorati and Flickr) to track and accumulate online responses to projects. Current projects include web sites, offline events and music labels but it could be applied to anything. It collects the information and displays it on a single page, giving members a look at how their projects have been received. The current plan is to offer the service for free and to release an enterprise version with additional bells and whistles to keep a roof over their heads. Its a great idea that may have appeal to individuals and corporations wanting to see the impact their product or service is having in the social mediascape.

There is a presentation on Press Army by UltraSuperNew head Mike Sheetal online (in Japanese and English) and you can apply to have a poke around at the Press Army site.